Dear ports community,
as the removal of ports is a recurring source of friction and dispute we
would like to add a ports removal and deprecation policy to the porters
handbook.
We tried to find a sensible middle ground between too fast removal and
keeping unmaintained and abandoned upstream software in our ports tree
forever.
When can or should ports be deprecated or removed?
This policy should give some guidance on when ports can or should be
removed. In general ports should not be removed without reason but if a
port blocks progress it should be deprecated and subsequently removed.
In general, if a ports blocks progress for some time it will be removed
so that progress can be made. For more details see below.
Ports can be removed immediately if one of the following conditions is met:
- Upstream distfile is no longer available from the original
source/mirror (Our and other distcaches e.g. Debian, Gentoo, etc do not
count as "available")
- Upstream WWW is unavailable: deprecate, remove after 3 months
- BROKEN for more than 6 months
- has known vulnerabilities that weren’t addressed in the ports tree for
more than 3 months
A port can be deprecated and subsequently removed if:
- Upstream declared the version EOL or officially stopped development.
DEPRECATED should be set as soon as the planned removal date is know.
(It is up to the maintainer if they want to remove the port immediately
after the EOL date or if they want keep the port for some time with
backported patches. Option two is *not* possible without backporting
patches, see vulnerable ports) The general suggestion is that EOL
versions should not stay in the ports tree for more than 3 months
without justification.
- The port does not adapt to infrastructure changes (i.e. USE_STAGE,
MANPREFIX, compiler updates, etc.) within 6 months. Ports should be set
to DEPRECATED after 3 months and can be removed after 6
Reasons that do not warrant removal of a port:
- Software hasn’t seen a release in a long time
- Upstream looks inactive for a long time
Florian (on behalf of portmgr)
